CASE FOR REPRISALS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 119, 22 May 1941, Page 10

CASE FOR REPRISALS

INTERNATIONAL LAW EXAMPLES IN IrAST WAR Reprisals are lawrul. according to the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, who explains international law on the question of tit-for-tat. It has occasionally been said that no acts of reprisal are ever justified because two wrongs cannot make a right. The answer is that one wrongful act can make the other act rightful. International law is therefore correct when it speaks of the right to reprisal. In the last war me British Government exercised the right of reprisal on three major occasions. In 1915 it announced that it would use gas as the Germans had adopted this type of warfare, though the

Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to Mr. Asquith not to use "the same infamous weapon." On February 2, 1915, Germany declared her intention to destroy without warning all merchant vessels found in the waters around the "United Kingdom. The British Government thereupon issued the famous Reprisals Order-in-Council of March 11, 1915, which announced that all goods of enemy destination, origin, or ownership would be detained. The third British reprisal was the air raid upon Freiburg i.Br. on April 14, 1917, in which a number of civilians were killed. This was announced to be a reprisal for the torpedoing of two hospital ships ... "as a deterrent to prevent the enemy from repeating his crimes against humanity." Of these three reprisals it may be said that the first two were essential steps in winning the war; the practical value of the third is regarded as doubtful. Of these various instances, the first is that, as a deterrent, it may induce the enemy

to give up his illegal second is that it from obtaining an unfair »*SLSJ in the prosecution of the *£?*§ third is that it is an ernSlJfi action of the righteous m*s*fc of the people; in times sentiment can only in the form of reprisals/